Social Selling Mastery with Daniel Disney

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Kevin, I'm super pumped to be here today. I'm a huge KD fan and love what you've done with the group. So I'm excited to be here and hopefully we're going to, you know, cover so many core things that will help a lot of people. So, yeah. Excited to dig in?

Hell yeah, baby. Well, we're going to go straight into it, right? Because we don't do fluff on this show. So let's start with this. How do you define social selling? Because it's kind of this ambiguous term that gets thrown out there. So let's kick that off. What does social selling mean to you? And then we'll keep going from there.

Yeah, I'll tell you in just a second. But I had a conversation yesterday with someone who said, do you know I hate social sellers all they are those salespeople that send spammy LinkedIn messages, can't stand them. Social selling is rubbish. I literally spent two minutes describing them what I think social selling was and they turn around and said, oh, I get it now. I love social selling. Social selling is using social media to sell. But like in sales, there are bad salespeople and there are good salespeople, they're, you know, big. And the good salespeople, proper selling camp. And that's exactly what social selling is. When it's done right, it's utilizing social media and all its many opportunities and bringing it into the sales process. And social selling done right can be, you know, into every single part of the sales process from prospecting, qualifying, having conversations, follow up, closing after you've closed the deal and building relationships, long term accounts, future sales referrals, social could be utilized in every part of it. So for me, that's what social selling is.

And I'm glad you described it that way because I crack anytime I hear someone say they don't like social selling. I know they don't understand what social selling is like. Connecting with people on LinkedIn is not social selling, y'.

All.

Like, we'll get into some tactics here. So now here. So that was the what, Using social media to amplify, to get in touch, to help close start conversations through the whole cycle. So then why should someone utilize social selling? Like, why should this be something in the tool belt? And I think this might surprise a lot of people. I'm a cold caller at heart. I've been cold calling my whole career but I'm a huge social selling individual so I want to put that as the next question. Why? Why should a salesperson leverage social in their kind of tool belt as a seller?

So I was the same, Kevin. I've spent my entire, the large majority of my sales career out there knocking on people's doors, phoning hundreds and thousands of people on cold calls. I'm a traditional salesperson at heart. But why should salespeople use social? Very easy question. Are your customers using it? Chances are, right now, I can't think of when I started utilizing social about seven, eight years ago. The biggest argument for some industries, our prospects, our decision makers, aren't on LinkedIn, so it's not relevant. And there were some industries back then that was pretty true. But now with not just LinkedIn but all the other social networks, I would struggle to find any industry where a salesperson could honestly say, zero. None of our prospects and customers are utilizing any social media network. So if you have customers and prospects utilizing any of the social media networks, then social selling is important to you. Because if they're using it, it's your job to be using it as well.

And we're going to get into a specific one down the road. But I'm glad you said it this way, because everyone listening. LinkedIn is not the only social platform. It's where your customers are, it's where your prospects are. So that could be Facebook, that could be Twitter, that could be Reddit, that could be forums. Like, it's not just LinkedIn that is the social selling platform. So you've used all of them, right? LinkedIn, Twitter, like, I mean, you go anywhere.

I'm on every single social platform. I've won deals on most social platforms. And Kevin, I'll tell you what, one of the best ways I kind of describe it is, you know, there's little mazes you get in, like newspapers and puzzle books, sort of a square maze. There'll be two or three doors that go into the maze. One leads to the middle, all the rest lead to dead ends. That's kind of like what prospecting is like. Now, every single one of your prospects, customers, even you and I as consumers, we each sit within our own maze. And, and we have different preferences. Some people prefer the phone. And the only way you're going to get through to them and bring them in as a customer is by picking up that phone and calling them. Others prefer social. I was with a CEO of a manufacturing company in the UK a few months back, and this person said to me, look, I never answer cold calls. I get literally tons every single day. Got no interest in it. It's intrusive. I'm too busy. But I spend two hours on LinkedIn in the morning. I and two hours on LinkedIn at the end of the day. I reply to messages, I consume content. That's where most of our suppliers have come from over the last year or so. Again, no right or wrong. It's just different ponds to fish in. And again, salespeople, sales teams need to be actively fishing in as many of those ponds. Not just different social networks, but different sales tools as well.

No, I love it. I think Jeb Blount said it one of my favorite ways in his book Fanatical Prospecting. He said, you need to have an and mentality. It's calling and email and social and video and direct mail and face to face and trade show. It's not or the sales industry is not an or you don't call or social. It's they work hand in hand there. So, okay, so now as you know, a social selling expert, let's start with some of the mistakes. What are some of the things that you see people do wrong when they're social selling?

I'll tell you what, one of the biggest mistakes I see and I get it, in 99% of the companies that hire me to train them, the first thing I do is I look at their team's profiles and the company employees profiles. 99% of the time they're terrible. They're either mismatched, missing loads of key components, only focused on the individual. Most of them are designed like CVs, you know, to get hired. They don't represent the company. Right. And again, one of the ways I try and open people's eyes to this is that we no longer just have a physical presence. So when you work in sales, you're going to go see a customer face to face, you're going to dress up smart, you might wear the full suit, you'll wear something that makes you look professional. And what we're not doing at the moment is applying that same logic to what we now have, which is a digital presence. And we need to make sure that digital presence looks just as good as our physical one. So it's one of the first places that I always encourage salespeople to start with is their profiles. And for businesses and sales teams, you know, creating uniform profiles. I know you must have seen the team at gong, their profiles all match up. They've got the right on brand backgrounds, their profile photos are done with the matching color, you know, but they each have personality. It's not about everyone looking the same. Everyone looks different because they've got all different information within their profiles. But there's a uniformity. Just like wearing a branded T shirt or you know, a suit and a tie. It's about looking professional. That's probably one of the biggest mistakes I see and certainly number one place anyone listening or watching this could start with.

Okay, so bad profile. So now let's say I cleaned up my profile. What are other mistakes people are making? Alright, I got a pretty profile, I got a good picture, it says what I want. Actually, I personally have a question here. What are your thoughts on the description? Right, so for a while, you know, people just put their titles in there and then there was this big push to put in that description what it is you do, right? Like you know, I help VPs of sales close more deals, right? Or things like that. What are your thoughts on that? I'll share mine real quick because I think initially I liked it, but now that I see it all the time, if you're like, literally like, that's the one sentence you have to convince me to connect with you. If it doesn't resonate, right? If I see you ask for a connection, it says I help VPs of sales book more deals. Like, oh, I know what's coming after this connection, right? So what are your thoughts on like what should be in that description?

It's a tough one. So there is in reality very little difference between any format of description on your profile because of exactly what you said. There was a period of time where everyone was like, oh, it's a salesperson, not interested. So everyone changed their descriptions to be helping people achieve X with Y and trying to focus it on the solutions. And everyone's like, okay, that sounds a bit more exciting. And now when people see that, they think it's a salesperson because ultimately it's just a jazzy away. I think I did a meme about it with a Trojan horse and it's sort of salespeople hiding inside and the trojan horses are non sales job title. And then the customers are like, yeah, come on in. You know, customers see through that now. They're not stupid anymore, they're smart. So. But again, people look at sales job titles and some people still think, oh, it's a salesperson. People will look at those helping people achieve type descriptions and they'll go, oh, it's a salesperson. It's hard to win. I think the key is do what's on brand for you. They're kind of three core styles. You've got your job title so you can be nice and honest about it. You've got the helping people achieve style, or you've just got the sort of bullet points that maybe cover some of the key things that you offer or the key problems you solve. Again, there is actually very little difference between all of them. I would just go with what you feel right. As an individual.

Okay, cool. Like, that was when I was like, I wonder what Dan thinks about this, because I'm curious. Right? So, okay, so say I have a good profile. What are some of the other mistakes you see people making when they're trying to social sell?

There's three I'll cover very quickly. Number one is small networks. They only have maybe 500 connections or a thousand connections. You know, anything below those sort of numbers, pretty small. They're not proactively growing their network on a regular consistency. Number two, they're not engaging in the industry. They're not commenting on industry posts. They're not sharing their thoughts in comments, in groups or posts by thought leaders in their industry. They're not getting their name out there. And then number three is they're not sharing content. They might post once a month, once every two weeks. And if they do post, 99% of the time, they're just resharing the company's blogs, which they've probably been instructed to do by the marketing department. Those are the mistakes. When you link that all up, you've got a very dry and generally not performing social selling strategy. It's not working. And all you have to do is turn and change all of them and you'll start to see results so quickly. So, yeah, those are the biggest mistakes I see.

Yeah, I love it. Because people will do those things and then they'll blame social selling. Oh, see, social selling doesn't work for me. It's like, no, you're just doing it really poorly. Is that complete difference? So, all right, so I'm gonna. I'm gonna put you on the spot here.

A.

You know, I warned you this was coming, but I want to see it. How would you start from scratch? Right? So let's say you target the gardening industry. You have some sort of software that helps gardeners rotate their plants or something weird, right? If you were going to try to target the gardening industry, how would you go about starting social selling from scratch?

So the first thing I would do is research the industry. I would dig deep into the industry. Who are the thought leaders in the industry? Who are the biggest brands? Who are my competitors? Who are my prospects, my potential Customers and I would just immerse myself in that information, look through their profiles, look through their activity, consume the content, get a strong understanding. I want to be able to look at all the cards on the table and understand the industry I'm about to sell into. That would be phase one. Phase two is then start to build my personal brand in the industry. So whilst I've consumed all that content, I should have a pretty good understanding of what tone of content, what format of content, what topics they're looking, you know, that they're interested in. Start to create content and share content and engage and again, build my personal brand every single day. Sharing a bit of content, commenting on posts, making sure my profile displayed me as a credible person in the industry, Start to do that. I would mix that up then with starting to make cold calls, sending cold emails, attending industry events, just jump in the deep end and immerse myself in that space on a consistent, regular basis. And that I would become. I've done that pretty much every role I've had. That's how I've tackled it. And it doesn't take you too long to start building traction. And if you keep doing that consistently, that's how you've become successful in sales. But that's where I would start.

So if someone listening, right, they're like, well, I'm just getting started, you know, And I hate this phrase, but people say it all the time, like, well, you know, I'm just an sdr. Like, how do I. How do I establish myself as an expert in an industry? Like, I'm calling into, you know, like now we'll flip it. Like, I'm calling into VPs of sales, right? How, how do I establish myself as an expert? Like, how do I craft a profile or the content that makes them think, hey, I'm on their level when I'm maybe not.

I get asked that in nearly every single class I teach. And what I love right now is, you know, I know what the answer is. But now I'm starting to see the answer sort of come to life on LinkedIn. So I'm seeing a rise in SDR. LinkedIn rock stars. So there are people like Sarah Brazier at Gong Tom Boston and there's another guy from Salesloft. And these guys are just SDRs. But what they're doing is they're sharing content now they're selling to VP's of sales. Exactly that same scenario. They are SDRs selling to VPs of sales. Big gap between the hierarchy. They're just out there sharing the Story, sharing their journey, being creative with their content. Sarah did this amazing post where she literally wrote, Dear VPs of sales. Yes, that's me trying to get in touch with you. No, I'm not trying to spam you. Genuinely, you know, it was just an honest, you know, heart on her sleeve type post. But she got tons of engagement and so yes, it doesn't matter what position you are. The biggest advice I give when people say that is just be you. People buy from people, they don't buy from positions, they don't buy from companies, they buy from individuals. Be yourself. I always liked it when you knew in a job and you had that sort of trainee type badge on and someone will come and ask you a question, you're not going to know the answer, but you either panic or you say, joe, I don't know the answer, but give me five minutes, I'm going to go find it for you and I will share it and we can both let you. And you can suddenly be even better than the person who does know the answer. But you're putting more effort in just be you be comfortable with that and share your journey. That's what people want to see.

Yes, and a big tip here, y'. All, building awareness in your industry. It's not even so much about considered being an expert. I know who Sarah is. That's the first step. I know who she is. So if I then saw an email from her or I saw a message from her, now I'm more likely to engage with that message simply because I'm aware of her. Right? She is out there building her brand, but she also engages with my posts and it's having a long game mentality versus a short game. If you commented on every single one of my posts with some insight, not just great job like oh, this is cool or this is how I use it. And you did that for three months straight. Do you think I might recognize your name? That I might be like, who is this? And when you finally reach out to me, like now I'm ready to engage. So is that something you encourage in terms of commenting regularly on people? You're going after posts massively.

I wouldn't necessarily suggest doing it on every single post. You might come across as a bit of a stalker, a bit over excited, but definitely on a regular, consistent basis. Engage in their content, click the like button, add a thoughtful comment. Not just a great job, love this post, but actually share your thoughts so you start to again build your personal brand. I see some posts now where the comments get more likes than the post itself. So you write a good comment on a post, you're going to drive engagement and again further propel your personal brand. But yes, Sarah does that to your post. You're going to recognize that. And one of the best things I saw this right as I was starting in my social selling journey. I would go from normally picking up the phone or standing face to face with a prospect and spend the first five, ten minutes telling them who I am, what I did, where I worked, what we offered, kind of build a bit of rapport and trust when you start building a personal brand like people like Sarah have done. When I went to meetings often it was flipped the other way around where they say, Dan, loved your post last week, really insightful, loved what you were talking about, really enjoyed your content, really excited to sit down with you today. That transforms the relationship between buyer and sell away. Usually it's seller down here, buyer up here, desperately trying to win their approval and win their business. Suddenly you're at the same level. That's a powerful place to be as a salesperson. That's how proper selling is done. I've got something that can help you. You've got the revenue, you've got the opportunity to work together. We're mutually working together. That's how sales works, not I'm trying to convince you to buy something and I've got the money, so you need to do everything I say. Same level type stuff.

I love it. And so now we'll transition into this a little bit more. Anyone that's worked with me knows I'm a big fan of checklists, right? Like, like the checklist. This is how, this is how it's done and this is your members. So let's go through like a weekly social selling checklist. Like what are things that a rep or a leader should do weekly to start seeing success with social selling?

Yeah, I'll take the weekly and make it a daily thing. My advice honestly is a daily, daily use of social but not spending hours, far from it. So on a regular, daily basis. And you can just tally this up for a weekly, but I would be wanting to make sure their network's growing every day and obviously every week. So how many new connections have you made? And again, if you want to be even more into it as a sales leader, how many relevant connections have you added? Very easy to add random connections, but actually how many prospects have you connected with? Target Ideal customers? How much content have you put out? Have you put out a post every day? Great. What's the Engagement been like, have you commented on posts every day? How many messages are you sending to prospects? And of that, how many have replied? How many conversations have you had this week? And again, the most important metric of them all, how many sales have you closed this week or this month that have come from LinkedIn and social selling? And how many pipeline opportunities have you generated again that originated by LinkedIn and social? Those are the metrics you want to track and you know the activities behind that are again, sharing content, growing your network, engaging and obviously sending messages to open up those conversations.

Love it. So that actually kind of as a follow up question will go into how do you improve your connection rate? Right? So okay, cool. Like I hear you Dan. Like yeah, I need to go get more connections but no one's accepting my connections. Like how do you improve your connection? I guess was it this is a whole new metric, connection acceptance rate. I don't know if anyone tracks that. I'm sure some people do. But like how do you improve that right if you're trying to build your network?

How? There's a few kind of myths in social selling LinkedIn world. Some people out there passionately tell you you have to personalize every connection request. I can honestly tell you you don't. There are probably more. There are more people that will accept it without a personalization than those that require it. The minority that do what I will say from experience is the higher up the hierarchy you're trying to connect with, the more relevant a personalized connection. So if you are trying to connect with a vp, director, CEO, C level type exec, then yes, personalize it. But make sure the way you personalize it is good. I get tons of connection requests every day and the ones that are personalized, maybe 6 out of 10 are personalized with a terrible sales pitch or a really cheesy written self focused line about them and how great they are, instantly I'm not going to be drawn to accepting that connection request. So my rule of thumb is if they've got a relatively large audience, anything sort of above 1,000 connections, if they're posting and have posted within the most recent couple of weeks, to me that signals they're probably likely to accept your connection request without personalization. You know, they're quite active again higher up the tray, the hierarchy that you go adding a personalized message, but something simple like hi Kevin, would love to connect. Kind regards Dan, you know, hi Kevin, go a step further. Hi Kevin, loved that post you shared last week. Love your content, would love to connect things like that where you're showing flattery, you're showing that you want to connect with them as an individual. You're not just going add, add, add, add, add, add, add through everyone. Things like that can help you just increase the chance they're going to accept it. But definitely. Big, big no, no. Don't personalize a connection request with a sales pitch. One of the biggest no nos in LinkedIn.

Yeah, that's it. That's an immediate decline, y'.

All.

I'm just telling you, if it's like, hey, kd, I was hoping to connect so I could walk you through our automated lead gen platform. That is how. Nope, I'm already gone. Now, quick tip on, you know, flattery or saying, hey, like, I liked this post. If you can give someone the why, they're significantly more likely to engage with it. So don't just say, I loved this post, give me the why. Why did you love it? That shows me that you actually.

Shows that you actually consumed the content.

Exactly right. Because, I mean, people like me, people like Dan, we post a lot. So like, you, like, you can say this. And actually this is a new trend that's happening. Unfortunately, people are targeting people on, off of people's posts. So people are saying, hey, I saw you liked Kevin Dorsey's post. That must mean that you would like this. And they're like leveraging other people's brands for outreach. And I'm like, people will forward that to me and go, do you know these people? Like, no, I don't. Damn it. No, I don't know them. So. Okay, but now. So you, you touched on it briefly. And so I want to dive into this even further. How do you know it's working? Right? Because also too, and I hear this from especially like VPs oftentimes like, well, it's hard to measure social selling and if I can't measure it, then I don't want to do it. How should you measure it? Like, how do you know if it's working right? You called them, you emailed them, you hit them up on LinkedIn, you send them a piece of mail. How do you know social selling played an impact there? So how should people measure? What should they look for to know if it's working or not?

Yeah, I mean, that's a bigger problem in sales. And how can you truly measure where an opportunity comes from? Again, it's down to the metrics that you're watching and how you're recording it on a regular basis. So if you've got a CRM, it's easy to add in a checkbox. So where did the lead come from? Was it the phone, email? And again, I'd say maybe seven, eight times out of ten, you should be able to know where that conversation come from. You know, if it's not obvious, ask them, oh, you know, what drew you to us today? Where did you find our information? Again, if it's an outbound one, you should know, because if you've sent them a LinkedIn message and they've replied, boom, there. You know, the conversation started on LinkedIn, you picked up the phone. That's where it started. So I'd always recommend tracking it. You know, most people have a CRM if you don't create a spreadsheet to do it. I'd recommend focusing on two key things. So most importantly, track the key metrics. So how many deals were closed, how many pipeline opportunities. Track all those things again through your CRM, through a spreadsheet, whatever you need to do. And then the other bit is utilize LinkedIn's SSI score. It's not perfect, but it does give you a good idea. LinkedIn's very protective of their data, but it's one of the only ways you're ever going to really get some indication of how you're utilizing those tools. It will measure your profile, it will measure your search use using the filters, measure you connecting with the right decision makers, starting conversations and creating content that's, you know, creating engagement. That measures some pretty good stuff, but some people only measure that or measure that above the other stuff. And you need to make sure your focus is on the real metrics. I think as time goes on, and I'm hoping the LinkedIn Microsoft partnership continues to strengthen, they'll start to create more tools to analyze that data and get that sort of information a lot easier and quicker. But at the moment, it has to be a little bit manual.

Now, this is why I love these shows, because I get to learn something. I know very little about the SSI score. Like, I see it and I look at it and I go, that's cool. But I've never done anything intentionally about it, so that could you, like, educate me? And I would assume other people listening, like, what is the SSI score and why does it matter?

Yeah, so it's LinkedIn's Social Selling Index. That's what the SSI score stands for. It's built into their Sales Navigator product, but you can assess it for free. If you don't have Sales Navigator, and essentially you just click on a link and it will take all the data from your LinkedIn profile activity and it will give you a score out of 100. It's based on four key areas. You get a mark out of 25 for each one. It gives you an overall score out of 100. But the first one is establishing your professional brand and that's based on your profile, sorry, your profile and how you're engaging the right type of decision makers. Then it's your use of searching. So how we're using the various search filters on LinkedIn so again, if someone's social selling properly, they will be searching every day. I used to, when I had the free account right at the very start, I'd use up my search limit within the first week, week and a half of every month because, you know, I'm constantly searching to find prospects. Obviously with Navigator you get a lot more usage but you're using all those filters to find the ideal customers. Then it's focused on how you're connecting and messaging target decision makers and obviously getting replies. And then the final one is based around content and sharing. Content that actually generates engagement gives you that score out of 100. It will show you where you measure up in your industry. They'll give you, are you in the top 1%, top 2%, top 5% of your industry and where do you fit in in your own network, part of everyone in your sort of connection based, where do you fit in with your ssi? And again, as a sales team, you can get everyone's SSI score and maybe create a bit of a leaderboard on it on a monthly basis. Right. Who's got the best ssi? Again, it's like measuring cold calls. It's good to measure how many calls they make. You want to measure the outcomes of those calls and the conversations. But still those call volumes show effort and obviously those conversations drive results. So those SSI activities drive social selling results. This is quite a fun, fun way to measure it and gives you a good indication.

Absolutely. I'm going back to my team for sure and I'm going to take a look. You're like, I have no idea. It's not something I've ever really like, looked at before. So, okay, see, look, I'm learning. This is what's fun about this. Like, selfishly, I'm getting stuff out of this, which is great. So K, then let's shift it a little bit to humor in sales because this is something that I think for whatever reason has, is not talked about enough. It's very rarely done intentionally and oftentimes it's also. It's not done, like, I guess, to a Persona, right? Like, the only place that humor really got into sales. And I got to give credit where credit is due, right? Sean Kester from Salesloft was like the first breakup email guy, right? And he sent that first breakup email, which people are still sending today, by the way, which is like, you know, a, you're not interested. B, you're interested. You haven't had time. Or C, you're being chased by a hippo right now. And everyone was like, that's genius, right? And then that was it. Like, it's not something that I think people bring enough into. So let's talk about, like, first of all, do you believe in trying to have some fun in this game that we call sales? And then, two, how should a rep go about doing humor the right way while trying to sell?

I think this wall should probably answer the first question as to whether I believe in humor. I am all for humor. Sales work in general is tough. It's stressful. You have good days, you have bad days. You've got pressure. So it doesn't matter whether you work in sales or you put yourself in your prospect's shoes. Work is hard. Humor is a great way to break down trust barriers, a great way to show empathy. You know, things like memes and like the hippo example, it's things that break through the general corporate noise. Most of the noise out there, most of the messaging communication by salespeople and internal departments is pretty dull and serious. And do this, you know, why aren't you replying to me? Here's a proposal. Here's our prices, here's our information. It's all very serious stuff. When you can start to add a sense of humor again, you start to just break through all of that. So I'm all for humor. I've used it pretty much my entire sales career, and I love it when it happens to me. It wouldn't take someone long to look at my profile, see that this is what I do, and to realize probably one of the best ways to get in touch with me is to send me something humorous yet maybe 5%. The salespeople that are approaching me actually use humor. When they do, boom, I'll talk to them. It starts a conversation because I love it. I appreciate the effort they've made. They realize, you know, they've learned their audience. But, yeah, and the beauty of humor is you can apply to everything. So I create memes for salespeople. I've seen amazing humor in any industry. I think Dale Dupree was one of my favorite ones because you know, he did this in the copier industry. Pretty, pretty dull product when you think about it. A printer, a copier. But he went out there creating humorous content. I mean one of his videos he did was amazing. Cheesiest style of video, but it was hilarious because it tapped into the pain points. People banging their heads trying to get the, you know, the printer to work and then the toners exploded. He just tapped into his prospects pain points, put it into an entertaining style piece of content and shared it. That's how you cut through all of that boring noise. So yeah, all for humor. My only biggest tip with it, just make sure it's the right tone. It's quite easy to sometimes go a bit too far with it. Just make sure you stay on the right tone, but definitely use it.

One of my close friends and mentors, Jacker van der Kooj, the author of like the SaaS blueprints and winning by Design, he told me this once. He said, people want three things when you're interacting with them. They want education, they want information, and they want entertainment. And in the sales industry, so much of it is on information. Very few salespeople are actually educating their prospects at all. And even fewer are entertaining, right? Like make it entertaining because not only will you stand out, but also flipping it around. The rejection is a lot softer when you lead with humor. Like if you come after me and even if I'm not interested, but you made me smirk. You made me, you know, I don't even have to lol, but you made me go, that was pretty funny. Even if I was now I respond back, it's not going to be like, yo, like what the hell are you doing? It's like, hey, I got this. That was funny, but we're not a good fit right now or whatever. But now you're in a conversation, right? So how would you recommend, how would you recommend salespeople, I guess, understanding what is funny to their audience or their Persona, right? Like going after you, Obviously you run the daily sales so it's like, alright, sales meme, sales humor would work. Let's go back to the gardening example, right? I'm going after gardeners. How do I find out what would be funny to them?

You've got to understand your customer, you've got to understand your industry, you've got to understand the world that they live in. It's the only way you're going to learn. So go and have some conversation. If you don't know you're starting at that start line. You really have no idea. Go out there and start talking to them. Don't talk to them to sell a product. Talk to them to understand their industry. A, you might end up having more conversations that turn into customers and prospects. B, going to learn so much more information. If I'm going to go into any industry and try and create humor for it, I need to understand the pain points of my customers. I need to understand what they find funny, maybe what isn't funny, because some of those pain points might not be funny. Find out what the right tone and level is and then go and create it. I mean, you could get really easy. Go onto Google right now and type in gardening memes. You'll probably get tons of search results that will show you loads of them without even having to speak to anyone. You'll get a good idea of what is funny in that industry. You could do it for any industry. Go and put copy your memes. You could go in or just put gardening humor. There'll be, you know, the Internet is full of this kind of stuff. So get your answers from the Internet. Go and talk to your customers, understand their world, and then you should be in a good position to be able to create humorous content that is going to connect with them, that they're going to relate to, and it's going to break down some of those tough barriers and trust barriers that often are put up in the buyer seller relationship.

I hope y' all wrote that down because not only did he give it to you, he also showed you how to do it so fast. Just go Google it. Go Google industry meme. Persona meme. The worst things about being a Persona, the worst things of the blank industry. Go find the stuff that they think is funny, that they think is unfortunate about their roles, and then use that to build humor. It's also a better way to sell. It's just so much more fun when you're having fun with what you're doing. We did a contest a few months ago of like, who could create the best meme we could use to prospect doctors. And we had a blast. It was truthfully, like one of like the highlights of like the past, like 90 days, which has been rough for a lot of reasons. We had a blast. They were coming through with all of these amazing memes and like, we're laughing and we're joking. Okay, well, I'll, in the follow up here, I'll put some of those memes into like the channel on this, but have some followers fun with this. Guys like sales is hard enough. Why not have some fun? Why not make people laugh? Like, just go do it right. Like, so what's. Let's get this from you. What's. One of the best ones you've seen? What's one of the funnier things that you've seen either someone do trying to come after you or as you teach people, what's something you saw? Like, that was good. Like, that was funny.

I have a big fun spot for memes. They are close to my heart. So if anyone sends me a meme that connects with me is great. Memes aren't that easy to create. I see a lot of bad memes. Unfortunately, something that wasn't a meme, and I say it had a tone of humor, but it certainly got my attention. I had an accountant contact me about a year and a half ago and they sent me. It was a little compliment slip and it had a pound coin sellotape to the corner. And it had a note that very briefly just said, hey, Dan, here's a pound. I'd love to help you save more from the tax man. Fine. Regards, accountant. And I loved it because there's that tone of humor that's sort of saying, you know, I want to save you money, I'm going to give you some money. It just. I've never had anything like that. I think that's the only physical form of prospecting I've had, you know, in that time and probably same amount of time previous. It cut through the noise. I mean, there are so many accountants in most local areas. Instantly stood out. Level of humor, level of creativity, things like that stand out. When someone messaged me a meme, great, you've got my attention. When someone sends a funny video. Great. Or a humorous message, just make sure it's not salesy. Some people do it and they're blatantly just trying to sell something. It's not personal. You can tell they're kind of just sending the same thing to everyone. You need to try make it as personal as possible. That's the way you kind of cut through that noise.

I hope you all paid attention there because did you just hear. He remembered a piece of prospecting from a year and a half ago. That's cutting through the noise. That's doing something that's memorable. That's something he could just pull out of thin air. I did similar campaigns actually at Snack Nation, we would send a Rubik's Cube and say, figuring out blank shouldn't be this hard. We'd send a toy dinosaur and say, is your blank prehistoric a magnifying glass? It shouldn't be this hard to find something all, like, they're little things that then people go like, I don't even go for the laugh, I'm going for the smirk. If I can just make you go, all right, like, I'm in, right? I got a foot in the door to go through it. So direct mail, y' all. Don't sleep on it. It is still so powerful. If done the right way, you do need to do it the right way.

I'm going to give you two more quick examples. One that I've used personally is something you can do in the uk. I'm sure you can do it in the us. You can get customized Lego minifigures made. So I've had minifigures made of prospects that I'm trying to prospect. So I will dress them as they dress and make them look like they look, get their name on the little plate and then post that to them. And that always goes down well, you know, they love it. Who wouldn't love getting a little Lego figure of you?

I want one. Yeah, like someone listening. Prospect me. Like, come on, that would be amazing.

I'm going to do one for you from this. We're going to make a Kevin Lego figure. One of the other ones that an actual friend of mine did. So they weren't trying to sell to me, but the act and effort and what they did should really be taken note to by salespeople. We had a conversation, went out for dinner late last year and I talked about a chocolate bar that was new that I couldn't find anywhere. It was a new orange chocolate bar in the uk, couldn't find it anywhere. Was convinced it was a bit of a fake news type thing. Anyway, he went away, hunted for two weeks through all the shops in his area, found one in a really tiny newsagent shop, bought one, posted it with a little handwritten note and his business card in it for a bit of professional, you know, and it was great. If a salesperson had done that now, I might have written about that in my content, I might have shared it in a video, in a podcast interview. If you can make that effort, listen for those little nuggets. Maybe I talk about a book that I'm excited to read that I haven't read yet. Or maybe we're talking, Kevin, you recommend me a book now, I'm probably not going to buy that for a period of time. So maybe someone who's listening says, right, I'm Going to send Dan that book. Heard that he said he liked it with a little note saying, heard you were interested in this book. I've read it, loved it. Here's a copy. I really hope you enjoy it. Boom. You have just stood so far ahead of 99% of the salespeople out there. It's those little efforts that make big impacts.

Yes. And they're not actually even that hard, y'.

All.

It's not hard to do what we're talking about. It's just doing it with intention. Now you're talking talking books a little bit here. Talk to me about your book. Like, if I went and bought the million pound LinkedIn message, like, what would I find in there?

Right.

Like, what did you take? Because we only have 30 minutes. What would I find in that book? Because I know there's a lot of juicy stuff in there. Yeah.

So the main inspiration about this is my inbox. And most of the inboxes of decision makers I speak to are full of terrible sales pitch spammy LinkedIn messages. The inspiration for this, the reason this was my first book, because that's the first thing I wanted to tackle. But what it tells the story of is how one LinkedIn message opened the door to what became a 1 million pound sale. One of my biggest sales of my. That all started from a LinkedIn message. So it tells the whole story from prospecting that potential customer through to the messaging post. Messaging. What did I do through the sales process to close the deal and beyond? What it also has is 25 tried, tested and proven LinkedIn message templates that when used with authenticity, are going to create much better results. And there's a lot in the book about not spamming, not copy and pasting. Making sure you hyper personalize. It's all around creating the most effective types of LinkedIn messages. And there's lots of social selling tips in there as well. But that's the core focus.

Oh yeah, go scoop that up, you guys. And that's the beauty of the Patreon Group is it's a group of people that I know are interested in investing in themselves. Right. Like it's not just looking for the free handout or like if you guys honestly think you can learn how to sell or how to social sell from a 1300 character LinkedIn post, you're missing the entire thing here. Like, go scoop this up. Where can they get it? It's on Amazon. Like I have it in my Kindle right now, so I know you can get it on Amazon. Is that the best Place to go get it.

It's on Amazon. I tell you what I'm gonna do, Kevin, because your group is epic and I'm a huge fan of yours and your group. I'm going to give three signed copies to your group. I'll let you choose. Choosing by random.

Oh, hell yeah.

Three signed copies are on offer. You just send me the names and the addresses of the winners. I will sign it, personalize it, I will ship it myself, anywhere in the world. Pre signed copies up for grabs. Obviously, if anyone doesn't win and they're interested, it's on Amazon, paperback and Kindle. Should be pretty easy to find. But pre signed copies up for grab. Kevin, all your free.

I already know what the contest is going to be. We're have a meme contest. We're going to meet, we're going to meme it up and we're going to go. Dude, that is amazing. Okay. I'm so pumped for that. So, all right now, as we almost wrap this up, I have two final questions for you here. So the first one, I just call it like the big three, right? So you know, we've been going for about 30 minutes. We've covered a lot. When it comes to social selling, if they forgot everything that we talked about except for three things, what would be your three Tactical. This is what you have to remember when you're social selling.

Boom. Number one, profile. Go and update your profiles. Fill them in, but make them customer focused. What about you and how great you are at selling? How you help people. Who do you help? How do you help them? What do you help them achieve? How can they get in touch with you if they think that you can help them? Make it all about them. Get those profiles looking good. Number two, go and put yourself in your industry. Start to comment on posts in your industry. Start to share content in your industry. Get your name out there. Number three, send better messages. Don't look to pitch, look to start conversations. Go out there and start giving more value through those messages. Don't spray and pray. Don't send horrendous sales pictures, but just try and add value. Reference their content. Reference a pain point. Reference some research you've done. Make it about them. Profile. Immerse yourself in your industry. Get your messaging better.

They're the big three from Daniel Disney. And then last question, right? So the name of this podcast is live better sell better, right? There's plenty of sales podcasts, there's plenty of sales books, but oftentimes we forget about the person in salesperson, right? We focus all on the selling and not on the person. So the last question I ask every guest is, what would be your live better tip? Right, like, what would be something like you could tell someone or share of, like, here's how to get more out of life or how to live better, how to better take care of yourself. What would be your live better tip for the group?

I guess for me it's understand yourself, take time to get to know you, what motivates you, how you know, what do you need? Some people can work longer, some people need breaks, some people have different motivations, some people think, you know, you're motivated by money. And actually, when you get down to it, you're not motivated by money. You're motivated by what money can buy or the time that it's going to buy with your family, you know, understand you. And I guess attached to that, find balance. You know, it becomes very stressful when things get out of balance. You know, whether you've got family, whether you've got friends, make sure you're spending time, you know, make sure you're spending time just on you. Whether it's finding a quiet place and reading a book, listening to a podcast, going for a walk. Try and create balance in your life. It's difficult when you work in sales, when you're driven to succeed, when you're trying to be successful, those scales can tip because you'll end up working more, you're trying to achieve more, and sometimes that ends up sacrificing the things that are important to you. There's no reason you can't have it all. You can be successful and have time with your family and not work 90 hours a week. Just try and find balance. But again, it all boils down to understanding you, what your limits are, what you need, and how you can be the best you can be. Bit of a complicated answer, I guess, but that's kind of how it works for me.

Life is a complicated thing, so it sometimes comes down to a complicated answer. So, dude, my man, this was gold. This was so good. Thank you so much for diving in on this. Thank you so much for the book contest. I'm going to put that into the group tomorrow. I can't wait to see the memes that are going to come out of that. But thank you for your time. Thank you for your energy. Thank you for your insights. This was amazing, man. Let's stay in touch to the next one.

Thanks for having me. I hope everyone takes a lot away from it and good luck. I can't wait to see all these memes coming out.

Hell, yeah, dude.